The Cheap Seats

By Scott Poole

"From the cheap seats, those in the back of the house or the most distant reaches of the balcony, the view is different. What is missed in subtlety is made up for by the wider range of vision. From up high and far behind you can see more than the stage, and some of the more interesting moments take place in the margins. Not only do you see the sets, but you see them being built; not only do you see the stars, but you see the reflectors that give them light. In this first collection, Poole looks into the wings, noticing the story behind the story. His poems concern not his friend who goes crazy, but the reaction of those close to him. For him, the chimneys of a distant community look like cemetary stones, and they take his thoughts beyond the here and now. He doesn't have to know a New York woman to imagine one: 'long hair/ they are always combing, / thick hair that gets loose/ and crawls down the skyscraper.' William Stafford said that poets see things in a slant way, from a corner of their eyes. From Poole's cheap seats, there's a lot more to see."--Library Journal

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966861205
• ISBN13: 9780966861204
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Lost Horse Press
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.1" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

cheap poems, cheap laughs, cheap women, great book

If you are the kind of person who sits in the balcony at movies, wonders what Charles Manson is up to, dreams of showering in a waterfall, hates their job or has friends who are crazier than you, well, this is the book for you. These poems are funny and sad and hip in ways that you'll immediately recognize. They're also strangely beautiful. You won't look at the world quite the same way you used to when you finish this book.

Poole creates his own world: Tread lightly here, use courage

Scott Poole's mind is wired incorrectly. Something is wrong in this boy's head, and the result it all right with me. The poems in this book show us what the postmodern world can be. Half-literary, Half-media-insanity, Poole's universe is controlled like a dream. His hopes and fears are our own; his interpretations of these is entirely his. His language is highly visual, highly interactive. We see these poems and the worlds they disguise from our own history, from where he helps us to remember our childhood, loves and nightmares in which ponies in pink lace somehow can save us. Nature and nudity and hallucination abound in these poems. Lust has never been sillier nor more immediate. This is how the writer wants the world to function, and with good reason. Once you enter Poole's world, our own seems less than adequate, where imagination is only our own, in The Cheap Seats, it is a wild ride that we all share, crammed into the back seat of Poole's old convertible, as he drives toward the edge of a chasm. Trust him behind the wheel, this man knows how to drive.

Funny poems whose shadows add depth and emotional significan

Scott Poole is a funny poet for sure, but what strikes the reader are the shadows below the humor. The bite and the literal sadness. If one observes the world beyond TV, one is a philosopher of poets. If one is nimble-tongued and true to the heart's point-of-view, one is gifted to speak to us in a language we digest level by level as it settles through the skin and seduces our insides. That's a good thing, I think. Scott Poole is a poet with both these characteristics and his poems are literal and clumsy and real. I dare you to read one without laughing or realizing something new: "This silence is nothing but me./It drowns things too small to hear./It's a little car running out of gas/nowhere."